Without reading the exact context of Sale’s explanation, I assume he is referencing a common challenge that travel writers faced to relate their encounters back to audiences at home. The problem stems from the fact that the travelers observed real, living, breathing creatures with traits and behaviors that were often very unique. They might also learn about plants with certain medical properties or economic opportunities. Frequently, travelers also encountered people and societies with totally different cultural traits than anything the traveler had ever experienced. The challenge for the traveler then was to take that plant, animal, or culture and describe it to people who had never seen anything like it before. The audience often had no reference point for what the author was trying to describe, so the traveler faced a surprisingly difficult task of describing the encounter accurately AND having it make sense in the readers’ minds.

Take for example Marco Polo’s description of a rhinoceros. He says that they are “scarcely smaller than elephants. They have the hair of a buffalo and feet like an elephant's. They have a single large black horn in the middle of the forehead...They have a head like a wild boar's.” Without having a visual image in mind, explaining what a rhino looks like to an audience who has never seen one is quite difficult. To overcome this challenge, travelers wrote lengthy descriptions of plants, animals, people, and geographic settings that they encountered but continued to be plagued by the challenge of translating “unknown” into words.

Then on top of that challenge, travel writers often had other expectations that their descriptions had to meet. For instance, Columbus needed to convey to a royal audience that the voyages to the New World were worth the huge costs. Columbus had to describe the world he was encountering in favorable terms for himself and for the Crown to consolidate his own position of authority. At the same time though, he (and other travelers) had to be careful that the descriptions were accurate, just in case someone else came along and checked the veracity of the work. Descriptions that were proven wrong could discredit the entire account.

Depending on when they were writing, travelers had to write their reports in such a way that they would be appealing to their audiences. Explorers like Columbus wrote for royal audiences or to their sponsors who had expectations that the traveler would be on the lookout for ways to expand national power, grow personal fortunes, and advance religious interests. They might also want to impress their audience with how brave they were on their journey by incorporating elements of fantasy. Travelers often mentioned that there might be giants, cannibals, mythical cities, or strange creatures just over the next hill. It is not a coincidence that fantastic creatures and monsters lurking just beyond the horizons continued to pop up in supposedly objective travel sources. It became a way to show that they were also heroes, risking their lives not with a sword but with a pen.

Later as popularity for travel sources grew, they developed mass markets for travel works. Writers had to establish themselves as experts who corroborated, corrected, and/or added to existing knowledge of the “edge of the world” for audiences who were extremely curious about the New World. The styles that travel writing took changed over time to appeal to these different audiences, but the general expectations stayed the same: establish yourself as an expert since you had lived it through travel, describe what you saw and heard about, provide valuable information on plants, animals, and people, and entertain the audience at home using the style in vogue at the time.

It is this “problem of description” that has made travel writing such a valuable and exciting primary source. Historians use travel sources to learn not just about the places encountered but also about what the writing reveals about the cultures that the travelers left behind. Why does the traveler write about this topic? What does the traveler focus on? What does this show about what he or she finds important? How does the traveler describe different cultures in relation to their own? What does the traveler choose not to focus on? Often, the silence of the traveler is just as revealing as the descriptions.